When my cell phone starting vibrating with the first news of the police officer shootings in Dallas Thursday night, I was sitting in an outdoor chapel with 67 youth and 14 adult sponsors at our annual church youth camp. We were preparing to celebrate the Lord’s Supper together, an act of Christian solidarity.
Ironically, our Scripture passage for the day had come from the prophet Jeremiah: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” The day before, our Scripture lesson had been about Cain and Abel and the haunting question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
We had spent the week seeking to help these youth find their voices on the issues of their generation, inspired by the biblical witness. “Black Lives Matter,” the Orlando shootings, hunger, homelessness, sexual orientation all hung in the background of the conversation, some spoken, some not. But so often, to a teenager, these big issues appear distant from their own experience, like faraway stars in the sky, interesting but not reachable.
As the snipers were firing in downtown Dallas, our youth minister, Darren, had been leading us in singing a beautiful song made famous by the David Crowder Band: “You should see the stars tonight, how they shimmer shine so bright. Against the black they look so white, coming down from such a height, to reach me now, you reach me now. … And I wanna shine and I wanna fly, Just to tell you now, It’ll be all right, it’ll be all right.”
With those last words, Darren sought to assure these seventh through 12th graders on this last night of camp that despite whatever fears they have, whatever burdens they carry, whatever insecurities they harbor, it will be all right. It will be all right, he said, because of that night when Jesus gathered his disciples in an upper room and took the bread and the cup and said, “This is my body, broken for you” and “This is my blood of the new covenant, poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
And then I had to pull him aside a moment later and explain what was going on back home, several hundred miles from where we sat, soaking in the stars and thinking we at least understood all our problems.
Interspersed with the text messages and news updates about the Dallas shootings, I had received news that one of our church staff members had given birth to her first child, a boy. At the same hospital where the wounded and dead police officers had been taken. Could there be a more stark juxtaposition?
The youth were told both items of news at the same time, which seemed only fitting since we had spent the entire week talking about the ties that bind, how we are all connected to each other, what it means to be the body of Christ. And then we sat in silence and pondered the reality of both these events happening on the same night. And there were just no words. Tears of joy and tears of sorrow mingled together.
Sitting here writing these thoughts just an hour later, I think these may be the greatest lessons of all from the week at camp: Sometimes there are no words. But after a period of silence and gathering ourselves, we’ve got to speak up. And we’ve got to face the fact that we haven’t spoken up for others before. With that sober realization, we had to get up from the table and figure out what it really means to let our light shine.
After midnight, as the lights were out in our cabin, I sat on the bunk of a ninth grade boy whom I had seen openly sobbing in the chapel earlier. I knew he had called home to find out more about what was going on, and so I asked him how he was doing. “I’m so scared,” he said. “I have friends who would have been at that rally.”
One of the lessons I learned this week is that most of our youth are way ahead of us adults on this stuff. They are aware of what’s going on, they are passionate about it, but they often haven’t felt empowered to speak.